The Trump administration’s haphazard and opaque interventions into artificial intelligence security matters could catapult Chinese alternatives into broader acceptance, posing new security risks altogether, a group of Democratic senators wrote to top administration officials Monday.
The five senators said that the administration’s handling has alternated between too passive, such as when OpenAI models escaped testing in the Hugging Face hack last month, and overstepping, such as when the Commerce Department suspended access for any foreign national to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in June.
“The Administration’s ad hoc and unpredictable approach undermines U.S. competitiveness, heightening market incentives to adopt open weight models from vendors based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” wrote Sens. Kristen Gillibrand of New York, Adam Schiff of California, Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Kelly of Arizona.
In the Hugging Face hack, the senators wrote that “the Federal Government cannot be passive as these capabilities emerge.”
In the case of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspensions, the senators said that the administration “utilized an infrequently used authority to direct Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals (including foreign national employees inside the United States) citing an undisclosed national security concern later described as a narrow jailbreak finding.”
Because Anthropic couldn’t immediately assess users’ nationality, the firm had to disable both models for everyone. The administration and Anthropic negotiated for 18 days behind closed doors before reaching an agreement, the lawmakers complained.
“While the Administration may have been responding to real security concerns to protect the United States, even justifiable interventions can create broader harm if the standards and decision-making processes are opaque, ad hoc, or unpredictable,” they said in their letter to leaders in the White House, Office of the National Cyber Director and departments of State, Treasury and Commerce. “Moreover, when the Executive Branch exercises authority delegated from Congress, such as in the conduct of export control administration, it is essential that it keep Congress fully apprised of its actions and procedures.”
During the time Anthropic was under export controls, the stock price of “an entity-listed Chinese lab” nearly doubled, the senators said. And while Hugging Face was breached, the company “had to” rely on a Chinese open-weight model due to guardrails on U.S. frontier models.
“If American models are perceived as subject to sudden access disruptions based on a black-box U.S. Government process, or as unreliable because U.S. AI labs are overcorrecting in the face of this black-box process, companies and governments in the United States and abroad may hedge by adopting Chinese or other foreign models instead,” the senators contended. “That outcome would undermine U.S. technological leadership while increasing exposure to systems that may carry risks of PRC or otherwise directed censorship, espionage, IP theft, and other supply chain security risks.”
Their letter asked for answers to questions about the standards the administration uses to determine the national security risks a frontier model presents, what legal authorities it will use to invoke restrictions, which agencies are responsible for which decisions and more.
None of the offices or departments the letter was addressed to immediately responded to a request for comment.
The letter follows inquiries at the state level, where 15 attorneys general asked OpenAI for more information regarding the security incident at Hugging Face.